Last night, “Junior” and I went on Amber MacArthur’s show, Webnation, to talk about our show, Developer Junior. You can watch the clip by visiting Webnation’s site and clicking on the “Webnation May 06 – PT 3” link.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s episode 2 of Developer Junior, the show where “Junior” the puppet (played by Brian Hogg of Hoggworks Studios) and I show kids how to make the most out of their technology. In this episode, Junior and I go Hollywood and make a quick little movie using Live Movie Maker, which runs on Windows and you can download for free.

In case you missed the previous Developer Junior episode, in which Junior and I build a video game using Kodu, you can watch it here.

Junior and I are headed to CP24’s studios tonight to do an interview with Amber Mac and Maurice Cacho on their show, Webnation, where we’ll be talking about Developer Junior, technology, kids and how they all fit together. If you’re in the Toronto area, tune in tonight to CP24 at 7:10 p.m. to catch our interview live; if you’re, you can see the interview online when they post it to the Webnation site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Say “Uncle”!

This week on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast, we have a very special guest: Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin!

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Our guest on Ignite Your Coding this week, Jeff Atwood, has certainly made his mark in the programming world with the Coding Horror blog as well as his project with Joel Spolsky, the online developer forum Stack Overflow (which in turn gave rise to the Server Fault and SuperUser forums). Join me and John Bristowe this Thursday as we chat with Jeff about Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, software development, fake plastic rock, P=NP and whatever topics you, the listener, want covered.

We’ll be chatting with Jeff live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin on software craftsmanship

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My tech show for kids, Developer Junior, premieres today on Butterscotch.com! In this episode, Junior (the puppet) and I (the human) take a look at the Kodu game builder system and go through a quick tutorial:

Developer Junior is a show on Butterscotch.com aimed at the younger set and is all about helping kids make the most out of the technology in their everyday lives. It’s about writing programs, creating media, playing games, and having fun with technology. (It’s also a dream come true for me – I always thought I’d be a great host for a kid’s show.)

There’s another episode coming up, in which Junior and I walk through the process of making a movie using Live Movie Maker. Watch for it!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week’s guest on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast needs no introduction: it’s Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, whose job is to talk about software development and how to do it right, primarily using The Empire’s tools and technologies. He’s a household name in the minds of .NET developers worldwide, and even when I was deep in the world of open source software, I’d heard of him, what with his blog, the Hanselminutes podcast, his presentations at various Microsoft conferences and (of course) his membership in the elite group known as “The Gang of Foreheads”. His influence in the Microsoft universe is like that of the Illusive Man in the Mass Effect universe.

John Bristowe and I will chat with Scott about a topic near and dear to us: the state of the .NET developer nation. It’s an exciting time to be a .NET developer: we’re a year into Windows 7, a couple of days after the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4 and Internet Explorer 9 looming in the not-too-distant future and Microsoft making a lot of right moves. I can’t think of a better time to pick Scott’s brain and find out, straight from the source, what’s hot and what’s not in the world of .NET development. We’ll also pick his brain for tips on how to stay on top of your game as a developer in today’s ever-morphing industry.

We’ll be chatting with Scott live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

• Jeff Atwood on “Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock”
• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin on software craftsmanship

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

On Tuesday, Damir and I flew into Kelowna to do an EnergizeIT presentation for their software developers and IT Pro types. I must say that the Okanagan Valley, where Kelowna is situated, looks gorgeous from the air:

We landed, checked into our hotel, took a quick peek at the conference room where we’d be doing the presentation and then headed downtown for lunch. We ended up at a barbecue place called Memphis Blues, where we both had the “Big Daddy”, a sandwich combining pulled pork and brisket. It came with coleslaw and some really nice beans on the side, and we washed it down with Boylan’s diet root beer. Had we not had work to do, I would’ve gone for some “Lynchburg Lemonade” (Jack, lemonade and other stuff) and a shot of Bulleit (they have a decent selection of bourbons).

There wasn’t much time for sightseeing – we wouldn’t be in town even 24 hours – but I did manage to snap a couple of shots of the local scenery near the hotel, including the “Sails” fountain:

And a view of the lake:

We went back to the hotel and started setting up for our “From the Client to the Cloud” presentation, a giant demo in which we present a grand tour of what’s possible with Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Azure. I do developer-y things, Damir does IT Pro-y things and we show you – with actual working code, data and infrastructure – the sort of system you can build to help you get things done. And by “get things done”, I mean a real, working, employ-real-people, provide-real-service kind of business (we like tell-the-world-where-your-cat-is-right-now applications as much as the next person, and you can build that sort of thing on the Microsoft platform too).

Here’s Damir doing the setup for the presentation on his machine (that’s my laptop in the foreground):

And here’s a shot of the room about an hour before the session started:

We played to a full house. And I’m not kidding when I say “play”: unlike many other tech presentations, there’s no PowerPoint in this one until the very end. Instead, the EnergizeIT session has me and Damir telling a story about starting our own online insurance company and building the applications and infrastructure right in front of the audience. It’s all storytelling, live demos, actual working code and data, and of course, jokes (including me telling Damir to “Dance, server monkey, dance!”).

The feedback we got from the audience was great. Many said that they loved watching an all-demo presentation and were blown away by what Visual Studio 2010 could do. A couple of people said that watching the presentation made them want to delve into Visual Studio a little more, as we’d shown them many features and capabilities they didn’t know our IDE had. A number of people were also impressed by the breadth of the Microsoft platform and how easy it was to move applications from on-premises servers to the cloud.

With the presentation done, Damir decided to take it easy, while I went out with some of the attendees for burgers and beer at the nearby Tonics Pub. I had to make it a (relatively) early night, though: we were bound for Victoria the next day.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m looking a tad sleep-deprived in this interview – I was quite busy around the end of February and the start of March — but I managed to stay conscious long enough at the Confoo conference to do an interview with CT Moore (back in early march) and talk about my presentation, which covered both ASP.NET MVC and Microsoft’s relationship with open source:

Should you not have two minutes free to watch the video, the take-away points from the interview are:

• I really like ASP.NET MVC. It’s the way I choose to build web applications in .NET and it’s similar to other MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django.
• Microsoft’s attitude to open source is that’s it’s not a threat, but an opportunity. We compete with other companies, not software movements.
• Sleep is good.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Who’s On This Week?

The Ignite Your Coding live webcast returns this Thursday with Richard Campbell. If you’re from the .NET world, chances are that you’ve heard Richard on .NET Rocks! (the online talk show for .NET developers), on RunAs Radio (the online talk show for IT Professionals) or at his many speaking engagements, including those at TechDays. He’s both a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional thanks to his work supporting the Microsoft developer community. For more than 30 years, he’s been helping major organizations design and build applications: Barnes & Noble, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force.

John Bristowe and I will talk with Richard about how he got started in the world of software development, the projects he’s working on and how to deal with issues of scalability and performance. He’s applied that knowledge in building a network appliance that accelerates website performance at the company he co-founded, Strangeloop Networks, and we’ll pick his brain about how to make better, faster, scalable applications.

We’ll be chatting with Richard live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

We’ve got some great guests coming up:

• Scott Hanselman, who’ll talk about the State of the .NET Developer
• Jeff Atwood on “Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock”
• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin on software craftsmanship

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for another live Ignite Your Coding webcast! Today’s guest is David Laribee, who coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He recently wrote about technical debt in MSDN Magazine, and that’s just one of the topics he’ll cover in our live talk today.

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask David
• To register for the webcast (it’s free); you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last week, John Bristowe and I interviewed Jeremy Miller — “the Shade Tree Developer” – in a live Ignite Your Coding webcast. Jeremy holds the title of Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, Austin’s coolest ISV, and we talked about open source in the .NET world, StoryTeller, dependency injection and many other topics.

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

The recording of our webcast with Jeremy (which took place on March 18th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.

Direct Download:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and Ignite Your Coding co-host John Bristowe and I did a live webcast interviewing Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talked about building composite applications, design patterns, dependency injection and why it’s good for you, and other aspects of good object-oriented design as we understand it these days.

Ignite Your Coding is a series of webcasts in which John and I talk to some of the bright lights of the software industry about how they got started, what they’re doing, how they cope with the change that affects our industry constantly and whatever else they want to talk about, all with the goal of informing and inspiring you.

The recording of our webcast with Glenn (which took place on March 10th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.

Direct Download:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

David Laribee on Technical Debt

“Debt” is a term so unpleasant that we don’t even pronounce one of its letters. Technical debt is equally unpleasant in its own way; like the financial kind of debt, it holds you back and haunts you. It’s the hard-to-change, error-prone parts of your code that bog down your project and its maintenance. Ward Cunningham – the guy behind the wiki and contributor to the concept of Extreme Programming – coined this clever metaphor, and it’s the topic of Thursday’s Ignite Your Coding.

Walking us through the topic of technical debt is our guest David Laribee, who’s going to be our technical debt counselor, providing advice on how to pay back technical debt. He coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He’s also a co-organizer of the ALT.NET movement, and was a Microsoft Architecture MVP for 2007 and 2008.

If you’d like to know more about David’s thoughts on technical debt, check out this article of his from the December 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt.

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About?

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask David Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask David
• To register for the webcast (it’s free); you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My coworker Christian Beauclair, Senior Developer Evangelist, did an interview with IT in Canada about Azure, its parts and some development patterns for Azure that fit many business scenarios.

For those of you not familiar with Azure, it’s Microsoft’s cloud computing platform made up of three parts:

• Windows Azure, the operating system in the cloud where your applications run
• SQL Azure, the database engine in the cloud where your data lives, and
• AppFabric, which connects cloud, hosted and on-premises services together.

As for the Azure development patterns that fit common business scenarios, they are:

• Transparence: Simply moving applications and data from servers to the cloud. The benefits are cost savings, not having to manage servers, cost-effective scaling and opportunities to prototype without having to invest in additional hardware and software.
• Scale-in multi-tenancy: On-the-fly scaling by creating new Azure instances when demand increases. It’s hard to predict what demand for an online service will be; this “just in time” approach does an end run around having to make such forecasts and purchases based on them.
• Burst compute: This is scaling based on known peak periods, such as the Christmas rush for retailers or the Superbowl for pizza delivery. A cloud-based system like Azure lets you acquire more server capacity during those known peak periods and release them once the peak period is over.
• Elastic storage: This is data scaling – you can use Azure to extend your storage instead of purchasing more on-premises disk arrays.
• Inter-organization communication: Using Azure to host an API to connect to your company’s services or data (which may live in Azure, on some hosted system or on-premises). It’s a good way to provide services to the outside world while keeping your infrastructure manageable.

There’s more in the article, and even more in the interview, which you can either:

• Listen to, either on the podcast page or download the MP3
• Read, in the transcript (in PDF form)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

You can listen to the recording of the webcast (recorded on March 4, 2010) in a couple of ways:

• Download the MP3 below, or
• Subscribing to the feed and downloading it to your iTunes / Zune software. 

 Direct Download:

Subscribe to the podcast: (so you don’t miss an episode)

As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions on how to make Ignite Your Coding better, we want to hear from you! Feel free to email either of us – John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.

About Ignite Your Coding

Ignite Your Coding is a series of interviews where Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelists John Bristowe and Joey deVilla talk with some of the brightest lights in the professional programming world about their areas of interest, dealing with the constant change in the industry and their suggestions on how to be a better software developer.

Podcast Participants: Andy Hunt, John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.

Music: Win This Race by picadillyCircus Sound Design, courtesy of iStockphoto.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week’s Ignite Your Coding podcast features Jeremy Miller, Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. In our one-hour webcast, my co-host John Bristowe and I will discuss a wide range of topics, from newer OSS efforts in the .NET developer community and how they’re trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and many other topics.

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Jeremy Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free); you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free) here, where you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Eastern!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Glenn
• To register for the webcast (it’s free) here, where you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m.!

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For those of you who’ve been wondering if we’ll be setting up an RSS feed for recordings of Ignite Your Coding, the answer is “yes”.

Here’s how Ignite Your Coding works:

• On the actual day of the Ignite Your Coding live event, we do the interview live, as implied by the phrase “live event”. From 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (Eastern) on that day, we chat with our guest and you can listen to it as it happens if you’ve got a Windows machine running the Live Meeting client (available for free from the Live Meeting download page). The Live Meeting client also lets you see what visuals we’re putting up – mostly just information about our guest – and you can also use it to type in questions for us to ask our guest.
• After the live Ignite Your Coding event, we take the recording of the event, do a tiny bit of post-production (adding an intro and outro, checking sound levels and so on) and post the interview in MP3 form, with a link to the recording in an RSS feed so that your favourite podcatching application or system can grab them.

I’ve got my plate full with more than the usual amount of tech evangelism activities, so there’s a team doing all this stuff. Once they tell me where they’re putting the recording and RSS feed, I’ll tell you. I’m told it’ll be soon.

Want to know about the upcoming guests on Ignite Your Coding? Check out the Ignite Your Coding site!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every Thursday in March and April, my co-worker John Bristowe and I will host the Ignite Your Coding webcast series. Each hour-long webcast will feature a guest speaker selected from the bright lights in software development. John and I will start off by asking them about their views on the industry and how to thrive in an era of great technological, business and social change, and then it’ll be your turn to ask the questions.

The theme of the webcast series is “staying on top of change”. I can’t deny hat there’s a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of “computable” isn’t even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life “in the trenches”.

John and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of “dream guests” and then inviting them to speak. John’s pretty well-established in the .NET world, so he went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. I’ve spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so I was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you’ll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We’ll record them all, so if you can’t catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for “paying back technical debt” with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He’s also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we’ll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a “what’s hot and what’s not” with developers of .NET today. We’ll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

A Chat with “Uncle Bob” Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.